


To Breathe ... Life

by Night-Mare (Aoife)



Category: Western European & Related Occult Traditions, كتاب غاية الحكيم | Kitaab Gayat al-Hakim | Picatrix
Genre: Gen, Mansions of the Moon, POV Third Person, Talismanic Magic, Traditional Astrology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 05:40:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Then she will take up a crucible of Silver, and one of Lead and one of Gold ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Breathe ... Life

She is sitting and scribbling with half a dozen texts open in front of her. Frantically cross-referencing from one to another, she is trying to account for missing variables in a science that some insisted was an art, searching for the motifs missing from an art that other called a science. No matter that the best texts on this were written when scientists still thought there to be only seven orbital bodies of any significance. 

She could work with that; work within in the limitations set by the Gayat al-Hakim. She could relearn astrology - learn it by the forms in which it was once taught at Oxford, Cambridge, and every other great continental school as part of the Quadrivium. Her calculations are painstaking, ridiculous, and she crosses them out over and over again growing frustrated. (It was galling to have those useless lessons come in handy now but surprisingly it's only parts of the traditional astrology training she's missing from her previous studies.) 

The calculations make no sense for the Talismans she's attempting to prepare. The language frustrates her at every turn until she picks up the books, weeping tears over the precious metals that it's taken her forever to scrape together. There's a flaw, something she's missing in her understanding, the price of reading in the wrong language, the feeling burning beneath her skin like stinging nettles.

And then she sees it. Sees the lines the stars make as they dance across the Heavens making up the Mansions of the Moon. Finally she believes and the forms for the Talismans flow from her fingers like she is possessed. (Perhaps she is possessed? She has summoned nothing, but a banishing, a dispelling, an exorcism should be carried out - just in case.)

Her pen skims across heavy paper, the designs for the Talismans at war with the astrological charts she needs in her mind. The pages become a messy combination of the two sets of diagrams interwoven. She knows they will leave anyone else breathless, confused as they try to work out where one starts and the other ends. But to her, they make perfect sense and perhaps that was the secret which lay within every one of the texts with which she has been so frustrated - that their reason could reside nowhere but within the mind of their authors as two and three dimensional space as yet incapable of containing their form. She lays down her pen and waits. The moon will ascend to its proper place within the dance of the Heavens. Then she will take up a crucible of Silver, and one of Lead and one of Gold ...


End file.
